


moonweaver's deck

by rievu



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Platonic Relationships, Tarot, and what it must have meant to molly and what it means now, because there is something beautiful about that unfinished deck, ep 90 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:14:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22246177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rievu/pseuds/rievu
Summary: Mollymauk considers it for a bit and looks down at the moon card again. Sometimes, he thinks he can feel the Moonweaver with him when he starts drawing a new card in the deck. He reaches for the deck again and pulls out card after card: the Silver Dragon, the Anvil, the Chariot, the Eye, the Shadow. He remembers how much time he poured into drawing each and every one of them, and even though he’s not as talented as Jester, he knows that his deck still matters because it’s his. Wrought with his own hands, wrought by the man that is Mollymauk Tealeaf and not anyone else.// about mollymauk’s deck of tarot cards
Relationships: Jester Lavorre & Mollymauk Tealeaf
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27





	moonweaver's deck

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers for episode 90, campaign 2

"Hey, Moooooooolly!!" 

Mollymauk looks from his work, and he can see Jester bounding towards him with a bright smile on her face. Her skirts billow around her with each jump she takes towards him, and his eyes widen as she makes a beeline for him. 

Not the beelining part, mind you. Mollymauk is rather used to that by now. He's more concerned about the part where she's barreling towards him, heedless of the campfire between her and him.

"Jester—” he tries to say, but it’s too late. He can see Jester take a large breath as she runs, and then, she accelerates her steps to surge forward into a grand leap over the campfire. When she lands, the heel of her shoe slips on some of the ash and dirt by the campfire, and she tumbles over by Mollymauk’s side. “Are you alright?” Mollymauk asks. 

Jester rolls over and flashes him a bright grin. “Yeeeeeeah,” she says, drawing out the vowel in the word for as long as she can. 

Mollymauk collects the cards from his deck that went scattering everywhere with Jester’s wild jump and places them all back in a stack. Some have the lightest sketches drawn with loving care in pencil, and some are blank. All are part of a Moonweaver deck though. Jester’s gaze drifts over the cards in his hand, and she asks, “Can I pick a card?”

He knows what card will be on the top, but he still proffers her the deck anyways. She plucks the top one off and squeals when she sees it. “Wow, Molly, this is so pretty,” she says. She flips it around to show him the moon card and continues, “The moon is so pretty, and the lake looks so nice.” She squints at it a little bit. “And is it _reflecting_ the moon, oh my gods, Molly, what does it mean?” 

Mollymauk takes the card from Jester’s hand and studies it. If he were to redraw it, he thinks he might improve the way he ended up drawing the water, but he answers, “It’s the Moon card. When you turn it over, it’s called a mirror, and when you look in the reflection, there’s two moons.” He smiles a bit to himself. “Depends on how you interpret it, but some see it as an oracle card. Others use the meaning of the reflection and the mirror in conjunction to other cards you might draw."

“Ooh,” Jester hums. “I like the sound of that.”

Mollymauk laughs a little bit and then shuffles every card back into the deck with a practiced flourish. He wasn’t planning on inking or coloring anything tonight, especially since they’re outside. He’d need more light and less danger around him to really settle in and start going in with his ink and gold leaf. He’s not quite an artist like Jester is, but he manages. 

They sit in the silence a little bit save for the sound of Jester’s pen scratching along the pages of her sketchbook and her slight hums. When he glances over, he sees a surprisingly lifelike sketch of himself by the campfire. Jester does draw Mollymauk with bows on his horns though, and he can’t help but chuckle softly at the sight of it. 

“Hey Molly,” Jester asks suddenly.

“Hmm?” 

Jester stops drawing to ask, “Where did you get your cards?”

Ah. Mollymauk tips his head up to gaze at the full moon swinging above them in the star-splintered sky and considers the multitude of answers he could give. To buy himself some time, he says, “Mother always told me to never give a story away for free.” 

He’s never had a mother, never had a father. At least, not within the short length of his memory. He knows, based on common sense and logic and reasoning and whatever else he could muster up, that he must have been a person before all this. He _was_ someone before all this, but just thinking about it feels all sorts of wrong. That sense of emptiness permeating his body and the weight of the grave on his chest was the first thing that he remembers in this life, not a mother or a father. He snorts a little bit to himself. Perhaps the grave and the moon could be his mother and father then.

He draws the moon card again and flips it so that it’s reversed. The second smaller red moon gleams behind the larger full moon in the reflection, and he remembers coloring the moon the same exact color of the indelible red eyes dotting over his body.

“I can pay,” Jester says decisively, startling Mollymauk out of his thoughts. She shows him her sketch and says, “A sketch for a story. I’ll throw in a ribbon too, and I can find a satin that matches your outfit too.” A grin curls the corner of her lip further up and she adds, “Ooooor I can draw you something else, like maybe a _really_ good dick with shadowing and crosshatching and all. I can make it _super_ fancy, trust me.”

Mollymauk laughs a little bit and returns to looking at the moon. “Alright, alright, I’ll give you your story,” he says. He trawls around his usual set of lies and plucks a few together to weave into a story. “So, there was a woman that I met, just before I joined up with the circus.”

True. He looked up and saw the moon hanging over him in the vast swathes of the night sky. He felt hollow and wrong, and it felt like time was passing without him really feeling the weight or the true passing of it. He just remembers staring up at the full moon, repeating _empty, empty, empty_ with a tongue that felt like lead and a mouth that felt like it was full of sawdust. But he saw the moon, and he thinks that might have been the Moonweaver smiling down at him from her place in the sky.

Jester nods along, and he continues, “She asked me what I wanted, and oh, I told her the usual. A platter of fruit, the most comfortable bed in the house with three pillows, a masseuse with skilled hands, something extravagant and obscenely delightful like that.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I know,” Jester says. She flaps her hand artlessly towards Molly and says, “The Lavish Chateau was _really_ good at that, and the masseuse is probably has a lot more skill than just a massage, you know, _you know,_ heh, we _know.”_ The pitch of her voice dips low as she speaks, and Mollymauk knows what she’s talking about too. It makes smile, honestly. 

He rubs the pad of his thumb over the back of the Moon card and says, “But the woman told me that she didn’t have that, not yet. She gave me these so that I could eventually find a way to get what I wanted. Told me that they would be useful. Told me that I would find what I wanted.”

“That lady must have been _sooo_ smart because you _did_ get a platter of fruit and a massage and all that in the end,” Jester giggles. She reaches up to boop his nose and says, “Remember when you came down afterwards with only that tapestry of that dragon dude? Caleb went bright red, and I couldn’t stop laughing.”

“I am your god, long may I reign,” Mollymauk says with an ironic smile. Come to think of it, Jester was right. He did find what he wanted. He came back to himself, lived in a body that was not quite his own, and became what he wanted to be. And what he wants to be is _Mollymauk Tealeaf,_ not Lucien or whatever fucker came before him.

“Fjord once told me that the best way to tell a lie is to put some of the truth in it,” Jester says. Mollymauk glances over at her, and for once, her expression is sober. She’s still smiling, but there’s a sense of seriousness to her gaze that she often forsakes in favor of levity and a good dick joke. “And he must be right, you know, since he's good at talking like you are. It’s a nice story, but I do really hope that you find what you wanted with the cards.”

Mollymauk considers it for a bit and looks down at the moon card again. Sometimes, he thinks he can feel the Moonweaver with him when he starts drawing a new card in the deck. He reaches for the deck again and pulls out card after card: the Silver Dragon, the Anvil, the Chariot, the Eye, the Shadow. He remembers how much time he poured into drawing each and every one of them, and even though he’s not as talented as Jester, he knows that his deck still matters because it’s _his._ Wrought with his own hands, wrought by the man that is Mollymauk Tealeaf and not anyone else. 

And he is. He’s happy to be here, happy to be Mollymauk Tealeaf, to reinvent himself into a person that he’s happy with. He doesn’t give a single shit about Lucien or the Nonagon or whatever happened in the past. He’ll weave lie after lie after lie under the light of the moon, and he’ll be damn proud of whatever he makes of himself. 

So, he sets all the cards back in the stack, one by one, in the order that he pulled them. The Shadow, the Eye, the Chariot, the Anvil, the Silver Dragon. Finally, the Moon. And maybe some of the cards hit a lot closer to home than some other decks might. Maybe the moon in the lake is an eye, but it’s _his_ eye beside the Moonweaver’s moon, and the deck is his to reinvent and make for himself. He’s proud of that. Then, he looks at Jester and answers truthfully, “I think so. I think I did. I’m happy.”

“That’s good,” Jester breathes out. She reaches over and taps the cards before she says, “They’re all very pretty. I’m glad the nice lady gave you the cards.” 

She hoists herself up and gathers her things to dance off to another member of the Mighty Nein. But before she leaves, she lightly pats Mollymauk on the shoulder and says, “Good night, Molly. Sweet dreams, okay?”

“Okay,” Mollymauk tells her. His face creases into a soft smile, and he watches his friend shuffle on over to Yasha and Beau with the same spring in her step. Then, he looks up at the moon and murmurs, “Good night, Jester. Good night, Moonweaver.”

He decides to start inking the next card at the next tavern and makes a mental note to pick up some more ink and maybe a bit more of gold leaf. Mollymauk places the deck back with the rest of his things with utmost care before he turns over and drifts off into peaceful sleep.

* * *

Jester doesn’t care about a lot of things, and the fact that she’s dealing with an incomplete deck is one of those things. In fact, she thinks it makes the deck even _more_ special. She lays out all the cards on the table in front of her and pushes aside all the other books that had far too many words and not enough pretty pictures inside of it.

She studies the patterns of the cards. She may have been bored by the books, but this is her domain: art. The curl of a line, the colors and the inks on the cards, and the messages and meanings that might be hidden in each one. It’s something that she’s been doing for as long as she remembers, whether it be in a corner of the Lavish Chateau or on the deck of a ship or within the Xhorhaus underneath Caduceus’s great roof-tree. She’s an artist, and she figures that the incompleteness of a deck won’t really affect the grand meaning of it. She can make it work.

As Jester looks through the cards, she realizes a few things. Some of the cards are aged and worn, but some of the cards are simply… Blank. The entire deck appears to be a Moonweaver deck, but it’s incomplete in a way that she didn’t expect. Oh, some cards are still there. The Serpent, the Chariot, the Anvil, the Eye. Those are all still there, and Jester fondly taps the Eye card because that’s the card that Beau now has emblazoned on the back of her neck. Still, she didn’t expect them to be blank. She only thought that the ones that they left by Molly’s grave would be the ones missing.

Jester lifts up one card to carefully study it. The Eye card is ornate and detailed, but when she brings it closer to examine it, she sees the way some of the ink feathers out towards the side and notes the shade of the red coloring the eye. It almost looks exactly like the eyes that Mollymauk had tattooed on his body. There’s actually an uncanny similarity. Although she readily admits that Mollymauk could have just had the tattoo modeled after the card, she remembers how Mollymauk once mentioned that his eye tattoos wouldn’t take any other ink. 

She can feel the warmth of the Traveler at her back, and his spectral hand reaches out to tap the surface of the blank cards and then on the Eye card. Jester’s breath catches in her throat as she realizes that the only other possibility would be to have the card drawn after the tattoo, meaning that _Mollymauk_ must have drawn this card. 

“They were _his,”_ she whispers to herself. Her hands start to shake a little bit, and she sets the card back down on the table. Beau has _Mollymauk’s_ art on her neck, and she now has a piece of Mollymauk in her hands, moreso than she ever realized.

Jester wipes a tear that she didn’t realize she was shedding and looks down at the Moonweaver deck in her hands. They left the Moon card by his grave, but she knows what it looks like. A moon over a crystal clear lake and a smaller, second red moon hiding behind the first moon in the secret reflection. Red like Molly’s eyes, red like the eyes tattooed on Molly’s skin, red as the blood that he used to do his deadly magic with.

She pulls out a blank card and carefully begins to pencil in the outlines of a sketch. Perhaps it’s fitting that the first one that she draws is the Moon card. After all, that was _Molly’s_ card. It might have been the Moonweaver’s or something like that, but in her mind, it is firmly Mollymauk’s card. She might not be able to recreate the same kind of Moon card that Molly drew when he was alive, but she still knows that it’s _him_ in every part of it. And even though her heart hurts and her eyes sting with unshed tears and her hand shakes over the card, it feels right to finish Molly’s cards.

It feels right.

**Author's Note:**

> y'all that bit about molly's tarot deck emotionally punched me in the gut


End file.
